t least half the years of your sleep--in
every generation--multitudes of people, in every generation greater
multitudes of people, have prayed that you might awake--_prayed_."

Graham moved to speak and did not.

She hesitated, and a faint colour crept back to her cheek. "Do you know
that you have been to myriads--King Arthur, Barbarossa--the King who
would come in his own good time and put the world right for them?"

"I suppose the imagination of the people--"

"Have you not heard our proverb, 'When the Sleeper wakes'? While you lay
insensible and motionless there--thousands came. Thousands. Every first
of the month you lay in state with a white robe upon you and the people
filed by you. When I was a little girl I saw you like that, with your
face white and calm."

She turned her face from him and looked steadfastly at the painted
wall before her. Her voice fell. "When I was a little girl I used to
look at your face.... It seemed to me fixed and waiting, like the
patience of God."

"That is what we thought of you," she said. "That is how you
seemed to us."

She turned shining eyes to him, her voice was clear and strong. "In the
city, in the earth, a myriad myriad men and women are waiting to see what
you will do, full of strange incredible expectations."

"Yes?"

"Ostrog--no one--can take that responsibility."

Graham looked at her in surprise, at her face lit with emotion. She
seemed at first to have spoken with an effort, and to have fired herself
by speaking.

"Do you think," she said, "that you who have lived that little life so
far away in the past, you who have fallen into and risen out of this
miracle of sleep--do you think that the wonder and reverence and hope of
half the world has gathered about you only that you may live another
little life?... That you may shift the responsibility to any other man?"

"I know how great this kingship of mine is," he said haltingly. "I know
how great it seems. But is it real? It is incredible--dreamlike. Is it
real, or is it only a great delusion?"

"It is real," she said; "if you dare."

"After all, like all kingship, my kingship is Belief. It is an illusion
in the minds of men."

"If you dare!" she said.

"But--"

"Countless men," she said, "and while it is in their minds--they
will obey."

"But I know nothing. That is what I had in mind. I know nothing. And
these others--the Councillors, Ostrog. They are wiser, cooler, they know
so much, every detai